


Now Is Found (the Fairest of Roses)

by riverlight



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Epistolary, F/F, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-15 19:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13038105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverlight/pseuds/riverlight
Summary: It’s not as simple as “happily ever after,” no matter what happens in all the stories.





	Now Is Found (the Fairest of Roses)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pikkugen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikkugen/gifts).



It’s not as simple as “happily ever after,” no matter what happens in all the stories. 

Oh, it’s not that they’re false, all those old tales that end up with the family gathered around the hearth, laughing and singing songs, the cat in its basket and soup on the hob. I got all that and more, those first summer weeks after coming home to Dvernik and appearing at my parents’ door, exhausted and lonely and heart-sick. After the initial awkwardness that first day, when I came yawning downstairs for breakfast and my parents stumbled into silence at my appearance, and we all found ourselves tongue-tied by the questions we didn’t know how to ask, we somehow managed to settle into life together as if no time had passed. I suppose it helped that, despite the wilder rumors about me that had already started to reach our village even before the people in the capital could possibly have known for sure about the Wood-queen’s defeat, I was still their daughter: my time in the Dragon’s tower hadn’t made me any less likely to stumble into the ash-pan, or get my hair tangled in the carding-comb, or manage to drip candle wax all over my shoes. 

So suddenly I was surrounded by all the family warmth that I’d missed so desperately, those first long weeks and months in the Dragon’s tower: my parents smiling at me across the dinner table, my brothers’ hair-tousling and rough hugs, the familiarity of my little narrow bed with its soft linen sheets, the comforting horse-smell of my father’s stables, the taste of sweet mid-summer blackberry pie. It was all the things I’d longed for, all the things I hadn’t even realized I was missing, and I stored it up greedily like a bee gathering honey, knowing myself loved.

But all the same, the stories don’t really tell what happens next. At the end of the story, Davel comes home to Elisibet and they share the fruits of the harvest with the neighbors, or Ina lights her candle in the window, or Lidiya and her husband tie rowan branches over the mantel while the baby sleeps in his cradle, safe. But you never learn what happens after that. 

You never hear that Elisibet misses her freedom, after her husband comes back, or that the troll breaks his promise to Ina even though she faithfully lights her candle, or that Lidiya and her husband are happy but their son dies in his second year—or any other ending you might imagine. 

It’s not that I wanted the stories to be sadder than they are, but—I’d outgrown my childhood home. Literally: the letniks my mother had saved, folded up with lavender, no longer fit. I’d grown taller, and broader in the hips.

* * *

That was when I started exploring the outskirts of the Wood, poking determinedly under fallen logs and clambering into trees to see what I could see. My mother shook her head at me, but for all that she loved me, I began to realize that this was somewhere she couldn’t follow. I hadn’t been back in Dvernik for three days before I ventured out into the Wood again, a handful of dragonfly-balm blossoms and dried spruce needles tied up in my pocket and only one or another of Jaga’s little cantrips for calm or cheerfulness of heart to keep me company.

My mother couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t explain it, myself; I only knew that I had to do it, had to dig my feet into the soil, had to touch the bark of new saplings to feel whether they carried any corruption, had to dip my fingers in the water to taste, dangerous though it may have been. For my mother, and my father and brothers and all of Dvernik, the Wood was nothing but danger and horror and fear. How could I explain that Sarkan and I had seen the Wood-queen, had spoken to her in a vision, and had watched her unfold herself into something deeper, something no longer malevolent? With Sarkan there we could have done the Summoning to prove it to them, but Sarkan was—well. In Kralia still, I supposed, or Gidna, scowling and stomping around the Palace to protect what he saw as the interests of the young Prince. 

And that, of course, was the problem. I missed Sarkan, and his scowls, and the way he drew his shoulders up when he was irritated. If you’d asked me, during those endless days when he tried to pound knowledge of magic into me, whether I liked the way his voice cracked in outrage when he called me “you idiot,” I’d have laughed, or maybe cried. But now that he wasn’t there to poke holes in my arguments or push me to “try again, but correctly this time,” I missed it quite desperately. I loved Dvernik, and loved my family—but after a time that dearness and ease began to chafe. 

_I need to be doing something, _I wrote to Kasia. _I hated Sarkan at first for making me learn magic, but I see now why he loves it so. It catches you up, sweeps you along, and there’s always something new to master, something new to learn. I don’t know what the other girls did, I never asked him, but I always had a task to occupy me, whether it was cooking dinner or trying spells or poring through the library, and I think after a time I got used to that. Now that I’m home again, I don’t know what to do with myself._

That was the other thing; I had never lived in Dvernik without Kasia. I kept expecting to see her there: waiting for me on the low stone wall outside the baker’s, or appearing at my door to invite me out to go berry-picking, or simply coming down the road to find me because she had something she wanted to tell me. All my memories had her in them, and it was strange to be back home, as I’d so often wished, and find her gone. 

That was what made me decide to move to my little tree-cottage in the Wood. “Busy hands lift a heavy heart,” my father used to say, and I found it to be true: my brothers laid the walls and thatched the roof for me, but everything else was my glad labor, and on those days I worked late into the long summer evening, taking advantage of the light, I found I was too tired to miss anyone, too tired to be at all sorrowful for Kasia or Sarkan or the children. 

_I miss you too,_ Kasia wrote back. _Gidna is lovely, but strange. I’m not used to the sea! Remember when we read Jens’ Travels and we played that we were travelers too, setting out on board ship for adventures in Vestra Ryket? It makes me laugh, to think of it: how wrong we were! It’s nothing like the Spindle in full flood. The horizon disappears, water into sky, and it never stops moving. And the waves make a constant sighing sound, just at the edge of hearing. I wish you were here. At least then I wouldn’t be the only one who found it so odd. Everyone here doesn’t even notice it._

It satisfied me in a way I hadn’t expected, using my own hands to build my own home. In the normal way of it, I would have married some boy from Zatochek or Olshanka, and our families and friends would have come together to build a little cottage for my parents to move into, and we’d have ceremonially swept out their old house with a new-made broom, and then we’d have moved in and borne children and made the house our own. But my life had taken a turn the day the Dragon came to Olshanka and conjured a flame out of thin air in front of my face, and so instead here I was, hair bundled messily into a kerchief, smoothing whitewash onto the walls of a cottage I’d live in on my own, singing spells under my breath for new beginnings.

* * *

_I think I missed the midwinter gathering most of all when I was in the tower,_ I wrote to Kasia. _I could see the bonfires from my window, and all I could think of was how everyone I loved was together, drinking hot mulled wine and eating holiday foods, and there I was, all alone. I know it’s some months yet, but say you’ll come back, even if just for a visit. Surely Stashek can spare his champion a little time. It won’t be the same without you._

It was a long, hot summer, as if the world around us was trying to give us a little golden sweetness, a little time to adjust to the reality of a world in which the Wood was not—the Wood. The weather stayed clear and golden for endless days, perfect harvest weather, and the men got the whole wheat and barley crop in without a single day of rain before it was all shut up safe in the storehouses. The pigs all grew fat on chestnuts before the slaughter, and there was even time enough for the hunters to go out before the snow fell; they came back with not one but two bears, winter-fat. It would still be a hard season, with the cows gone, but less so than it might have been; we could survive. And then one day Danka rode off to Olshanka on market day and came back leading four little calves, which we settled, with great fanfare, into Laszlo’s barn, since it was the most central. They didn’t make up for the cows we’d lost, but if we could keep them alive through the winter, we’d have the chance at fresh milk, come spring. The joy was almost enough to outweigh how much I missed Kasia, missed Sarkan.

And then Sarkan came, appearing in the midst of the dancing at the harvest festival, and it was another sweetness, heaped upon so many that my heart felt like one of the heart-tree fruits: so full and ripe it could almost burst. He was prickly and distant and wouldn’t even unbend enough to dance with me once the musicians forgot their shyness at his presence enough to begin playing again, but he came and perched stiffly on the chair next to my mother, and he accepted a glass of vodka and an apricot pastry and made stilted small-talk with my father and Laszlo until the moon rose and people began to drift home. He didn’t even flinch when my father, daring and slightly drunk, clapped him on the shoulder to say goodnight. 

_I’ll be back before St. Aglaida’s Day, so wait for me to make the candles,_ Kasia wrote. _Plenty of time for a good long visit, in other words. The children can’t come; their grandfather thinks it’s too soon for them to go away. But I’ve made him promise to let them come next year. They miss you: Stashek wants me to tell you that he has a new short-sword and Marisha says to tell you she has a new kitten that she’s named Natalya. So, consider yourself told! But, Nieshka, why didn’t you tell me the Dragon had come back? I had to hear about it from my mother when she wrote. Will he be staying, do you think? We hear all sorts of rumors here about what is happening in the Wood, but nobody really knows. I can’t tell if having him there would make people feel safer or if they’d assume we were all still in danger. Please tell me what you think, and be honest; I’d rather know than not._

I didn’t know how to tell Kasia about Sarkan, not least because I didn’t know if he was staying or not. I hadn’t been able to imagine it: he’d spent so long doing everything he could to not put down roots, to stay distant and apart; would he really change now? And his tower was more rubble than not, with a gaping hole in the ground where the Wood-queen’s tomb had been. But he said, almost grimly, “someone will have to handle the nastier creatures in the Wood, and these dusty-footed farmers can’t be trusted to do it,” and to my surprise he spent a morning closeted with Danya and the other headmen and -women, and not long after that several of the strongest men took a break from the harvest-work to clear an open space around what had been the green in the center of Porosna, and then began to build—well, it wasn’t a new tower, we hadn’t the stone for that, and it wasn’t a house like the rest of us had, wooden and thatch-roofed, but it was a house all the same, broad-shouldered and sturdy and roofed with slate brought by cart all the way from the mountains beyond Olshanka. 

“I can hardly stay in this—cottage with you,” he said, quellingly, “it would hardly be proper,” but he was hardly someone who cared a whit for what was proper, and I said as much.

“I think you’re just worried you won’t be able to maintain the proper air of mystery if people start thinking of you as a man, like other men,” I said, teasing, and he glared at me but didn’t say anything, which was practically an admission. 

“I refuse to live in a house that’s half roofed by living vines,” he said, but his lips curled up in a smile as he said it, and in any case he’d let me persuade him into a joint working to bind the vines to the beams and make them flower, so I didn’t think he truly minded that much. 

_I don’t know what we’re doing,_ I wrote to Kasia. _He’s hardly the type of man to bind my wrists with red ribbon and ask that the banns be read, even if he hadn’t been alone for so long. And even if I wanted him to, I wouldn’t bind myself to someone who wouldn’t stay in the valley. I don’t know. Men! My mother laughed when I said that. I suppose there’s a reason the priests call it ‘a great mystery’—and I don’t just mean the bedding! Are you meeting any marriageable men, there in Gidna? Solya excepted of course._

The hardest part about those first weeks in the tower, even beyond the fear and anxiety and uncertainty, had been being shut up inside; I’d spent my whole childhood running wild in the woods and even the Wood, sometimes with Kasia by my side, sometimes alone. I’d known all the secret hollows and shady groves, known where the foxes lived and where the best berries were found. I’d loved the woods in the brilliant luminous green of new spring and the lush dappled shadows of midsummer; loved them in the crisp winy air of autumn and the crackling starlit cold of winter, and to be kept inside felt like I was being stifled. So I spent as much time outside as I could, as that long gilded summer melted into autumn. It was hardly a hardship; and in any case Sarkan was right, it _would_ take a lot of work to clear the Wood of its most malevolent inhabitants. Clearing the heart-trees helped, but it would take a long time until the Wood was just another forest. 

So I spent my days wandering the winding paths wherever they led, pressing spells for good dreams and relief of pain into the bark of twisted trees and shadowy, looming rocks, singing songs for cleanliness as I went along. And my nights I spent sometimes alone, sleeping wild under a canopy of stars and watched over by some walkers, but sometimes also with Sarkan, with the windows thrown open to the late-summer light as we learned each other’s bodies and coaxed each other into pleasure. 

I hadn’t wanted, either, to think about what exactly I thought I was doing: had I been any other village girl, my parents would have dragged me, willing or not, to the altar to be married, if I’d carried on with a man in such a way. But apparently the rules were different if you were a witch and a wizard, and I don’t think it was because they were scared of us, either. Me they knew too well by now to be afraid, and after all I’d grown up there, the wood-cutter’s clumsy awkward daughter even if I now knew magic, and—well, maybe they were scared of Sarkan, after all. I supposed Sarkan would always be the Dragon, above the rules. And I needed Sarkan like I needed the trees, or my family, or magic: not as necessary as air, but almost more needful. I could do without them for a time, but without them, or him, it was half a life, sadly diminished and small.

* * *

Sarkan, naturally, spent his first weeks in the valley salvaging what he could from the tower. The library, of course, had been protected by spells against fire, and nearly all of the books survived, and even some of the more valuable potions were safe in their lined boxes, row upon row of jewel-tone bottles dusted with ash but otherwise unharmed. But as summer turned to autumn and the wind turned chilly and the nights cold, he began spending his days not in the Wood, as I expected, but in the fields around where the tower had been, caring for the dead. While I’d been brewing growing potions and trying to coax the walkers into tameness or at least standoffishness, he had, it turned out, laid a stasis-spell over the bodies of Marek and Vladimir’s soldiers, so they’d lain all this time in the fields and shallow trenches in which they’d fallen. “If they were corrupt, we’d have had to burn them,” he’d said, grimly, when I asked, but they weren’t corrupt, only normal corpses, sad and somehow empty.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, since I’d seen him with shirtsleeves rolled up and hair in disarray working to dispel the Wood’s corruption during the Green Summer, even before I really knew who he was, but somehow I’d grown so used to him as so fiercely intellectual that it did surprise me, nonetheless. “Your hands are getting rough,” I murmured to him one night, examining his long narrow fingers by the light of the candle, and he grimaced and looked away, but didn’t argue. “Someone has to bury the dead, and better it be me than someone else,” he said, and refused to elaborate. 

_The hardest part, I think, is the loneliness,_ Kasia wrote. _The children are healthy and as happy as can be expected, and I’m glad for it, but it’s still hard. All my life I grew up knowing I was a Dragon-born girl, and so I had to learn more and know more and be better than anyone else, no matter what else I wanted. But the thing is, that was my life: I don’t think I know how to imagine myself any other way, because in any other life I wouldn’t be me. Does that make sense? And—my point is—I always had you. Even when my mother was—oh, I don’t know, making me learn weaving, or forbidding me from swimming in the river, or drilling me in St. Walburge’s Catechism, I knew you’d always be there, and you’d make me laugh. Here, I have nobody, or at least nobody who knew me before I was—well, a girl made of wood, or however you want to describe it. Was I ever just a girl, a truly normal girl like Elena or Olga or any of the other girls at home? I don’t know: maybe not. But I’ll never be a normal girl now, and it’s—lonesome. Mostly people avoid me, whether because I am—how I am, or because I’m the Young Prince’s Champion, or something else entirely. Who knows? There’s Alosha, who’s becoming a friend, but it’s not the same. You know me better than anyone: how am I supposed to make a home for myself here, if I don’t have you to remind me who to be?_

It was Kasia who’d wondered, idly and longing, what it might be like to be a musician who traveled the roads, meeting all the varied folk of Polnya, or an adventurer, doing battle against griffons and hydras, or even (how daring it felt, and how we laughed!) a beautiful courtesan who captivated all the Magnati. My dreams were never that bold. I suppose I never needed such wild dreams, with my future laid out ahead of me like a path through the forest, familiar and well-loved. And yet somehow I’d ended up not only taking the special honor of being a Dragon’s girl but also (oh, so daring!) coming home again, afterward. 

_I wish I could give you some share of my happiness,_ I wrote. _It’s all so unfair. I suppose life is unfair—I still dream of those soldiers, the ones who accompanied us into the Wood that first time with Marek, do you remember?—and if that’s not proof that life is unfair I don’t know what is; why should we be alive when they are not? And more to the point, why should you be lonely? I could wish that Solya made you happy, or Adnan, or any of the other people you’ve met there—because after all how can I not wish you joy, my dearest friend? But I confess I’m glad they haven’t. If you don’t fall in love with someone in Gidna, you’ll maybe someday come back home, and I can’t help but wish for that. Maybe it’s selfish, but there it is. Anyway, you’ve seen all my selfishness. At this point you can’t be surprised._

* * *

It was the morning of the first real snowfall, just before St. Aglaida’s Day, when Kasia came home. It wasn’t full winter yet, but the cold was a knife-edge at night, a promise: soon enough we’d be buried deep in snowdrifts, with frost on the windowpane and the fire singing its song on the hearth. But it wasn’t quite winter yet, and so I’d thrown open my windows, to shiver in the cold while I aired out the cottage, one last time before spring. And then came the knock on the door.

“Nieshka,” she said, smiling and bright, and I flung down my broom and flew gladly into her arms. For a long moment we were silent, clinging to each other, and then we began to speak at the same moment. “Nieshka, is this a house or a tree?” she said, laughing, at the same time as I said, “Why didn’t you _tell_ me you were coming?” grabbing her hand, and then we were tripping over each other again: “Oh, it’s a house built in a tree,” I said, and she said “I’ve never travelled from Gidna home again, I didn’t know how long it would take,” and we both burst out laughing and stood there like fools gazing at each other in delight until she said, gently amused, “Well? Aren’t you going to show me your house-built-into-a-tree?” and I gathered my wits and led her inside. 

It was small, my little tree-cottage: just the one main room, with the hearth in one corner and my bed, behind its curtains, tucked into another, and cushioned chairs and a table and soft carpet in between. For a moment I saw it as she might see it: its softly curved walls and its cascade of vines, its dim shadowy coziness so unlike the bright, clean spaciousness of the houses we’d grown up in, and I worried what she might think after the grandness of Gidna, which was after all Polnya’s second largest city. 

But then she set her bag down with a thump, and heaved a deep breath, and let it out again, and turned to me. “Oh, Nieshka,” she said, “it’s _lovely,”_ and I couldn’t help it; I had to gather her in for another hug. 

“Don’t _cry,_ ”she said, laughing and poking me in the ribs, and I said crossly, “I can’t _help_ it, you’re _here.”_

The strange thing was, once I’d showed her the cottage, and once she’d described how she’d traveled as far as Kyeva with a caravan of monks who were apparently in a rush to reach their monastery in time for St. Aglaida’s Eve, we stood and stared at each other in awkward silence. So many times I’d wished her here with me again, and yet here she was, and I was stuffing my hands into the pockets of my letnik like an awkward girl at her first midsummer’s dance. “You’re…well?” I asked, and she said, “Well, yes,” she said. “Thank you,” and ducked her head and looked at the floor. 

“Why is this so strange?” I burst out, just as Kasia said, “Oh, Agnieszka, I _missed_ you,” and we laughed again, a little strained, and stood in silence for another few awkward seconds. 

But then she reached out and took my hand. “So, Agnieszka,” she said, solemnly. “Rumor in Gidna has it that you’re Baba Jaga reborn, and you’re only waiting for a sign from the heavens to shed your disguise and come in glory to the palace in Kralia and ‘chastise with great fury’ all the wizards who let the Wood gain so much power.”

“That’s not the worst one I’ve heard,” I said. “About a month ago, a traveler came to Olshanka and told them he’d heard we had a witch here who had defeated the Wood by the ‘power of her irresistible beauty—” Kasia made a comic face “—which would of course have been fine, except that then the traveler to Olshanka told Anton the butcher, and when he told _us_ the story, everyone turned to look at me, and I was a little bit muddy, only a trifle, you understand, but I’d just come in from the Wood—” and then we were laughing, and it was like no time had passed at all. 

We sat at my little table and drank tea and ate seed-cakes, and caught each other up on all we’d missed. We’d written, of course, but now I got all the little details: how her room in the palace looked out onto a garden full of night-blooming flowers, how the courtiers hadn’t known how to react to her for the longest time, how Marisha sometimes evaded her nanny and came and curled up with Kasia in her bed on nights when there were thunderstorms. And I gave all the little details in return: how my first efforts at making growing-potions for the heart tree seedlings had smelled so much like fish that I had to air out the cottage for two days afterwards, how I’d charmed the candles in my window to light in time with the beacon-fires, how my father had come home from the woods one day trailed by an animal that was—if not actually a wolf—at least quite like it, and how it wouldn’t leave his side, so my mother gave up and let him keep it in the house. 

But it wasn’t all laughter and tea and sharing stories; as night began to fall I asked whether she would be staying at her mother’s house, and she sighed and picked up one of the ribbons from the table that we’d been using to wrap around the St. Aglaida’s Day candles, twisting it restlessly. “No,” she said. “Or, well, I suppose if I have to, but I’d rather not. Would you mind terribly if I stayed here?”

Of course I wouldn’t, and I told her so, but still, it was a sorrow. It truly didn’t seem fair, that there should be this thread of sadness running through Kasia’s life. “I would have lost her, anyway, if the Dragon had chosen me,” Kasia pointed out, but that didn’t make me feel much better.

* * *

“Do you mind, terribly, about Sarkan?” I asked her, curled up in bed together later that night, the fire burned down mostly to embers and only one candle still lit. We were lying side by side, sharing a pillow as we’d so often done growing up, curled up together under the blankets: a storm had swept in that afternoon, and even with the fire it was bitterly cold.

She reached out to stroke my hair. “I did in the beginning, a little,” she said. “I suppose you saw that in the Summoning.” I nodded: I had. “But,” she went on, “I don’t, anymore. I think I would mind,” she said, slowly, “if I felt as if he were taking you from me, but I’ve never felt that.” 

“He couldn’t, anyway,” I said. “I was yours first.” 

She smiled, and twisted one of my curls round her finger. “Good,” she said. “Does he make you happy?” 

“Sarkan,” I said, “aggravates me, irritates me, makes me so frustrated I could spit, and also makes me feel like I must have stolen somebody else’s happiness, because surely it’s not supposed to happen this way to me.” 

“You deserve it,” she said, stoutly. My Kasia: loyal to the end. 

We lay in silence for a few seconds, listening to the sleepy music of the fire. “The hardest thing, though,” Kasia murmured, after a time, “is that without you, there’s nobody who touches me.”

“What do you mean?” I said. Everything felt hushed: we were murmuring to each other in the quiet. 

“Just that,” she said, a little impatiently; I tugged her a little closer, in apology. “Except for the children, everybody’s too afraid of me to get close. Oh, Solya was perfectly willing to propose,” she said, with asperity, “but that wasn’t about _me,_ really. He just wanted to be able to say he’d done it.” She sighed, and shifted a little in the bed. “I get so _lonely,_ is all,” she said. “Here you are, with your family close by, and you have Sarkan, and—” she broke off. “I don’t begrudge you it, and I don’t think _I_ could live here, not happily, but—”

“—but it’s hard,” I said, “to be alone, when we grew up like we did, with our families so close by, and with each other.” 

She sighed. “You _do_ understand, then.” 

I did. My parents had both been free with affection, with hugs and kisses and love; even Wensa, who was so hard on Kasia to prepare her for being chosen, was fiercely loving in her way, and and the rest of us had, I think, tried love Kasia while we could. My mother and father had certainly treated her like a second daughter. 

“I was all right, at first, in the tower,” I said. “But after a while, I’d wake up in the night in my bed, and I’d nearly weep with longing for you, or my mother, or anyone at all. I’d tell myself it was all right, that there were people in the world who loved me, but it didn’t help.” 

“No,” she said. “No, it doesn’t, really, does it?”

“Turn over,” I said, nudging her. “I’ll just have to hug you, while I can.” 

She rolled over, and I slotted my knees behind hers, pulling her against my chest. Her body was still that gleaming wood, and I supposed it could have been awkward, holding her, but she was still my dear Kasia. I tugged her close, fitting my hand under her ribs, and we fell asleep that way, together in the dark.

* * *

I’m not sure where the idea came from. Perhaps I dreamt it, or perhaps it came fully-formed from the night sky, like something out of a story. But I woke in the dark of night with the thought in my mind that if I loved Kasia—and of course I did, that was as deep a part of me as my magic—that if I were going to love her properly, I should love her this way, too.

I hadn’t known what bodies were capable of, not really; my mother’s no-nonsense instructions about a girl’s wedding night had, I discovered, rather left out a fair amount of information. I had never heard of this, but—I’d always loved Kasia, always, and she’d always been beautiful to me. And wasn’t that what the priests said, in the marriage ceremony? ‘Those that love one another, may they be of one body,’ it went. ‘Those that are beautiful to another’s eyes, may they become one in the sight of their hearts’? I didn’t know how we might ‘be of one body,’ Kasia and me, but I hadn’t known it with Sarkan, either, and we came to it together. Surely Kasia and I could—

“Nieshka?” she murmured, drowsily. She wasn’t awake, not really, but I’d stirred enough to wake her. And oh, she _was_ beautiful to me. Her hair was spread out on the pillow, her cheek pillowed on one hand, and she was so beautiful. She smiled at me, half-asleep, and I felt again that sweetness, as if my heart were full to bursting. 

“Go back to sleep,” I said, and leaned down, and kissed her. My joy felt like magic, overflowing, and I let it pour out of me, a silver stream. 

Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at me, startled. “Nieskha?” she said again, startled, wondering, and for a second I didn’t know what to say. If this were strange to her, if she didn’t want—

“Just,” I said, and leaned down to kiss her again. “I thought—” For a second, I didn’t know how to say it, but truth had always served us, I supposed, and this was as true as any story I knew. “I love Sarkan, but I’ve loved you longer. You’re half of my heart. I don’t think I can bind myself to him if I can’t bind myself to you.”

For a second she didn’t say anything, but then she smiled. And oh, her smile was like the sunrise. “Nieshka,” she said, again, joyful, and tugged me down. Her kiss felt like like light on the water of the Spindle or the sweetness of summer in the heart of the Wood: the thread of joy that had always wound through my life, gleaming and bright. 

And I shouldn’t have worried, because she was there with me, we were there together. “Yes,” she said, into a kiss. “There are ribbons left over from the candles. We’ll bind each other’s wrists in the morning."

And it might not have been as simple an ending as you find in the stories, but oh, it was as sweet an ending as I could have wished.

**Author's Note:**

> For pikkugen, with many thanks for the prompt, which gave me the excuse to write my first story for a fandom I love!
> 
> In case you're curious, the soundtrack to this story—and the source of the title—is the album "Last Leaf," by the Danish String Quartet. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_4USfVRJ1k) my favorite track from the album for your listening pleasure!


End file.
